A real tower that I found real treasure in--for a certain definition of treasure:


The Tower Treasure

Fourteen years is a long time to live in a place that never really feels like home. I was thrilled when I had the chance to leave the big city where I had found myself spending most of my twenties and thirties for a small town back in my home state. I’ve never regretted that decision. Still…during those fourteen long years I got to know a lot of good people, and do many enjoyable things, and see many interesting sights. I’ve found over the years that I miss the place now and then. Now I go back to visit the city about once every two years.

Much of what I do there involves simply walking around certain parts of the city. I spent a lot of my free time walking when I lived there. It was a pastime that didn’t cost any scarce money, and anyway I have always had a need to get out and move around when not bound to my mostly sedentary work. The past two decades have brought a lot of change to the city, and to the university campus where I used to work. Large parts of the campus have been radically redeveloped, and there are whole streets and blocks nearby that I once frequented where I now have trouble getting my bearings.

A lot of familiar sights remain. I always like coming across a familiar sight after a long time away. Sometimes I notice things that in all those years I had somehow missed. Even the new sights mixed in with the old can be interesting. I’m as happy just strolling around a pleasant older neighborhood as visiting the more touristed parts of town.

Early on the morning of my first full day in town, I parked a few blocks from the big university campus where I used to work. The plan was to visit the campus in late morning. I would start by heading into the historic neighborhoods to the south of the campus. This was not too far from the general area where I had lived during my time in the city. It had been one of my favorite places to walk.

It was a mild fall day. The trees were showing their autumnal leaves. There were people and vehicles around, but not too many. I got to see many lovely houses, many of which I specifically remembered. Here and there I sighed when I saw a lot that had been insensitively redeveloped by somebody with far more money than sense, somebody for whom the neighborhood’s already substantial houses somehow just weren’t anywhere big enough. At least there were not all that many such eyesores.

Sometime after nine a.m., I walked onto the campus of another university located beside the historic neighborhood. I recalled it being a fairly small school in comparison to the place where I worked. It has grown remarkably over the years since then. The campus of this school may have been more comprehensively redeveloped than even the one where I used to work.

One part of it remains the same. The campus was once a large antebellum estate. The original mansion, and part of its grounds, remains preserved at the heart of the campus. I can still stand at the mansion and look down a long formal garden that slopes downhill. The garden is full of plantings, gazebos, fountains, and outdoor statuary. At the foot of it stands a slender, five-story brick tower.

The tower has always fascinated me. Towers do in general. Whenever I see a tower, I wonder what it might have inside it. I wonder what I might see from up there, if I could get to the top. Usually I don’t get the chance to find out. In fourteen years of residency nearby, I had never had a chance to set foot inside this tower.

On this particular morning, only a few weeks ago, thirty-odd years after I first saw the tower, I noticed that the door appeared to be unlocked. The base of the tower now serves as a prayer chapel for the religiously-affiliated school’s students. I couldn’t resist stepping inside.

The chapel was just a small room with a few seats and a shelf containing some hymnals. An ornamental iron stairway along the walls led up to the next floor. I wondered, as often before, what might be up there, and what I might be able to see from the top.

I had hardly entered the room when an older man came in behind me. If you have spent much of your life around college professors, you can recognize one pretty easily. I could tell from this one’s bearing and outfit that he must be a professor or retired professor. He looked to be in his seventies, still in good health and vigorous.

We got to chatting, and I soon learned that he was indeed a retired prof, a former teacher of music history at the university’s well-known music program. He still lived near the campus. He also still had a function on-campus, which he had come to perform. He was here to play the bells in the tower. Would I like to accompany him? I jumped at the chance.

Many places have a school or church with a tower from which those around it can hear bells striking the hours and playing tunes. The college I went to as an undergrad had one, and we have a large church where I now live that plays the bells as well. Mostly these “bells” are merely loudspeakers that play recordings.

The tower in which we stood was different. It contained an actual carillon—an assembly of bells of different sizes and tones that can be played as a giant musical instrument. It was one of about 230 true carillons in the United States. And the man to whom I was talking was one of only a few hundred carillonneurs in the nation qualified to play them.

He led me up the iron stairway to the second story, telling me as we went that the brick tower had originally been built in 1853. Back then it had served as a water tower for the estate. A windmill-powered pump had filled a tank at the top with water to pressurize the estate’s fountains. It had, of course, long ago ceased to be needed for that original purpose. So in 1980 the university had installed a carillon. The bells had come from the Netherlands.

The second floor was merely a bare little room. A steep, narrow, somewhat rickety wooden stairway led to a third story that resembled a small office. The center of this room was dominated by a wooden framework with two rows of horizontal wooden rods, one above the other. It also had a row of wooden pedals, like those on an organ, and a bench and music lectern. On top sat a set of chimes. The professor explained that this was a practice keyboard. Its chimes could be heard only inside the building. This made it possible for a carillonneur to practice without the whole neighborhood having to hear it.

Another rickety stairway led to the fourth level. It contained a second keyboard that looked very much like the first. This was the true keyboard that operated the bells. They were one level above us. They ranged in weight from forty-odd pounds to about sixteen hundred pounds. Any acoustic keyboard is essentially a set of levers. The leverage needed to ring the bells, even carefully balanced as they were, was more than a conventional piano or organ keyboard could manage. Hence the rows of wooden rods, which corresponded, roughly, to the black and white keys of a piano. This was all news to me. I had read of carillons played by keyboards, and had always envisioned something that looked like an organ console.

The room also contained a worn-looking wall map of the United States, with dots on it that represented all the true carillons in the country. We were standing just below one of only two in the entire state. I was not too surprised to notice that my home state, a much less wealthy one than the one where we now were, did not have any.

A clock on the wall showed only a few minutes to ten. The professor said that he liked to play during the ten o’clock hour on weekdays. It was a good time for people on campus to hear the carillon playing without being unduly distracted. He removed his shoes and put on a pair of slippers to avoid scuffing the finish on the wooden pedals.

Then he opened a book of sheet music meant especially for the carillon and set it on the lectern. He had turned to a tune called “Simple Gifts.” I was somewhat familiar with it. Originally a Shaker tune, it has been used for several hymns over the years. I could remember hearing it at the big church downtown where I worshipped during my years in the city, and planned to worship that coming Sunday.

The professor began to play. He struck the ends of the keys lightly with the bases of his fists, moving his hands agilely from one to the other. I heard the chimes tolling in response directly above. Though not deafeningly loud, they emphatically filled the room with the notes of the familiar tune. I found myself pulled between watching the player’s fists as he played, and listening to the bell’s sweet yet powerful voices.

He finished the tune slightly before ten. The time-tolling bell automatically struck above us right on the hour. The professor explained that only the striking of the hours was automatic. Anytime one heard the carillon playing a tune, it meant that somebody was up there at the keyboard.

You learn something new every day. During the fourteen years I had lived in the general area, I had sometimes heard tunes being played on the tower’s carillon. I had never suspected that it was an actual carillon, played by an actual carillonneur. I thought about how thrilled my mother, a talented amateur musician, would be to hear me tell about this experience.

The professor told me a bit about where he had come from, and how he played these regular weekday sets, and on graduations and other special occasions. He walked and worked out regularly, and so still had plenty of energy to climb up to the keyboard.

I told him about the college where I had been an undergrad, and how it still had a small school of music of its own. He had had students from our college before, he said, and had gained a favorable impression of its music programs from them. He also got to hear about how we had once had a family dog who sometimes struck the house’s low-hanging wind chimes with his tail while wagging it, and how Mom had called him her “little carillonneur.”

It was now a bit after ten. The professor was ready to play his main set. He encouraged me, as I went out, to notice the difference in how the bells sounded inside and outside the tower. He was of the opinion that they sounded better on the outside. I took this as a signal that he was ready to be left in peace to play his music. It was time for me to be on my way anyway. The day was still young, and I had lots of plans for it. I headed back down the three flights of stairs, listening to the bells sounding above. I had been so absorbed in what I had found inside the tower that I had hardly bothered to take in the view outside the tower’s windows.

Outside, the sidewalks were teeming with people heading to and from classes and other activities on campus. I walked up the formal avenue toward the mansion, past what looked like a touring group of prospective students. Partway up the avenue, I turned and viewed the tower.

The carillonneur was now playing a tune that seemed familiar. Beneath the unusual flourishes, I recognized it as “Old One Hundred,” the centuries-old tune for the 100th Psalm that has in recent times been better known as the setting for a common doxology:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise Him all creatures here below
Praise Him above you heavenly hosts
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

I listened until Old One Hundred was finished. Another tune followed, but I did not get much farther up the avenue toward the mansion before the sound was drowned out by the noise of assorted leaf blowers.

The rest of the day went as I had hoped. I visited the larger university nearby where I had once worked and attended. At the graduate department where I had once studied I found one of my favorite professors, and had a wonderful visit with her. There was a meal at an old student hangout that still looks like it always did, and lots more sightseeing, and a good bookstore browse later that afternoon. I had the pleasure of telling Mom when I called her that evening about my little adventure in the tower.

The next day, I met for lunch with a couple from the town where I live who now happen to live near the big city. They asked me if I’d yet caught any music performances. The city is widely known as “the Music City,” since live performances are a big part of what the tourists come to see. They were half-kidding, since they knew that I was not one for catching the shows.

But I did have one music performance—and a “backstage” visit at that—to tell them about. They had never known that the tower had a true carillon either. What were the odds, I said, of my being there at just the right time to be invited up into the tower to watch the carillonneur at work?

“That was a God thing,” one of my friends said—a coincidence that is really more than a simple coincidence.

I had to agree.